NATIONALS AT WAR: ECONOMIC NATIONALISM AND ETHNICITIES IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

The Great War was a mobilizing force not only for the majority of Russian citizens but also for the multiethnic minorities in the Russian Empire, when there were radical campaigns against alien nations and national aliens simultaneously. The War drew the very bottom line dividing desirable and undesirable elements based on their ethnic background. Lohr’s analysis also demonstrates the complicity of liberalism in such excluding campaigns and the limit of Russian cultural assimilation approach in the face of naked power amid these campaigns. This historical lesson intensifies the anxieties of readers who either have diasporas experience or come from a multiethnic hybrid background, since the diasporas would easily become double victims when their country of origin was at war with their country of citizenship. Moreover, the implicated continuity of economic nationalism and ethnic exclusion between the Russian state and the Soviet system in two World Wars points to a difficult dilemma of expansionist development versus myopic nationalization that swaying to either extreme would lead to endless conflicts to the extent that war is both the consequence from and the driving force for such processes.
The book comprises introduction, five major chapters and conclusion. The Introduction brings out the problematic phenomenon that nationalism hastened the collapse of various Empires including Ottoman, Hapsburg, Qing China, and more evidently Russian and that of the recent Soviet Union. In the context of Russian Empire, a sweeping campaign against enemy aliens was developed in the Great War and became systematic during and after the Second World War. In the eyes of the military planners, should these enemy subjects be allowed to return to their countries of origin in the wartime they would become the opposing army. Modern citizenship hence became incompatible with the new military strategy of nation-in-arms. Such incompatibility became further complicated when the naturalized immigrant minorities, especially the German group, dominated the Russian economy.
Chapter one discusses the Imperial state drifting into a dangerous dilemma that whereas the war mobilized the public display of loyalty and created a real sense of nation against Germany, the mobilization campaigns went out of the state’s control that gave rise to a trend of essentializing nationality in the military case of spy hunt and in the public occurrence of fabricating rumors of treason and disloyalty against officials and economic elites of non-Russian background. Chapter two moves to the focus of two Moscow Riots against non-Russian elements and the state became a sole force to protect these alien individuals by putting them into prison or expatriation, albeit several cases of government’s implicit support of pogroms. The state’s complicity set the stage for nationalizing the commercial and industrial economy discussed in Chapter three. The State defined the nationality of a business corporation on the basis of that of the shareholders and owners instead of being a separate legal entity. Without any legal securities for private property and corporation management, aliens and naturalized aliens was imposed by the Russian government of economic restrictions that seizure, liquidation, sequestration and confiscation occurred accordingly in the name of wartime emergency under the martial law. Chapter four explores the process of nationalizing the land ownership, which began prior to the Great War. The bans on land ownership by Jews and Poles started from the late 18th century. The initial curbs on German immigrants’ acquisition of land in the late 19th century was owing largely to the shortage of land than to the Russian resentment against Germans. Despite the official limitation, German farmers owned roughly 24 million acres within the Russian Empire by 1914, most of which were among the best and most productive. Together with the new inclusive definition of overseas Germans into the greater German citizenship, the land amassment by the German immigrants posed an immediate threat to the Russian state. Expropriation and stigmatisation of enemy-aliens hence became inevitable and coincided with forced migrations discussed in Chapter five. Prior to the summer of 1915, deportation orders encompassed all enemy subjects throughout the empire, and the total of deportation was way beyond half the 600,000 registered permanent residents. The expulsion of Jews was estimated between half a million to a million. Such processes expectedly resulted in violence, pogroms and other mass operations resembling to modern “ethnic cleansing.” The conclusion ends with an unintended result that these stigmatized minorities developed their own ethnic identities and formed distinct and strong group-ties to their ethnic communities.
The book is very accessible and a good read. One intriguing question arises while reading Lohr’s book, that is, how the ethnic relationship among the minorities would be like, for instance, when Germans bought up land at the Poles’ expense (p. 88) and when Russian Germans looked into the eyes of Russian Jews. These intriguing questions raise an issue of Lohr’s unbalanced structure of narrative that he fails to encompass conflictural development and multilateral relationships among the State, the majority and the ethnic minorities themselves. The effect of nationalism presented in Lohr’s analysis of the Russian majority represented by the State against other ethnic minorities as a whole bypasses the entire array of nuances of nation imagined by various cultural and ethnic groups and individuals who had embodied the agency in the formation of ethnic identities as Lohr has recognized and yet fails to explore further after he postulates in the introduction and finally touches upon briefly in the conclusion.
Nationalism is a phenomenon of plural forms in the world politics. Cultural theorists, such as Partha Chatterjee, depict nationalism in the classic formation of European nation-states as a positive legacy to the world, while nationalism became a derivative replicate, often in its worst form of dark force, seen in the ethnic nationalism of the two Great Wars and the genocides in the third World. Against this grain of nationalism literature, Benedict Anderson’s study of Southeast Asia presents the ethnic nationalism as a critique of official nationalism. Prasenjit Duara and Mariko A. Tamanoi suggest that nationalism was a mobilizing force while the peasantry and the ethnic minorities were the participant activists and “ethnicity” was a consequence of such mobilizing processes through the apparatus of a linear History and daily life account in the Chinese and Japanese nationalisms. Duara and Andre Schmid further suggest the interface between nationalism and imperialism that the ethnological production of frontier zones and territorial claims in the nationalist (or anti-colonial) agenda can be an expansionist act to coerce the peripheries and explore their resources in the names of national sovereignty, or in the Japanese case, East Asian Co-prosperity.^[1]
Against the backdrop of this body of nationalism literature, Lohr’s wok provides a comparative historical perspective in the dynamics between the economic dominance of ethnic minority and the impoverished majority developing in any regions of our world. His contribution could have made more significant impact in our thinking of future ethnic governance and development by clarifying the relationship between Russian nationalism and ethnicity, and by giving us a picture of fluid interaction of plural actors – the State, the majorities and the ethnic minorities.